Asklemmy

My concern is that there's a sort of critical mass necessary for something to be an active community. As an example, let's arbitrarily say that critical mass is a minimum of 10 active users and there are 100 people interested in that topic on a platform, which means there up to 10 communities could be sustained.

In practice, there would probably only be 2-5 communities, with at least some overlap between them. If a subsection of one of the larger ones wanted to split off and make a new place to fill some unmet niche, they'd need at least 10 active users or the community would fizzle out and die.

However, if there were 20 equally sized communities for these 100 people, they'd be too small to gain traction. There'd be little overlap because each would be too small to really make a mark. It's hard to grow when you've got very little content or activity. Lemmy's sudden growth combined with confusion over how federation works means I've seen a few topics where there are multiple versions of that community, but all of them are small and quite inactive. I worry that instead of the people in those communities finding each other and either aggregating in one place, or finding ways to link up their separate communities, that all of them will fizzle out and die.